I received the copy of The Midland containing your article on my work, and am so well pleased with it that I have sent it on to Macmillans in the hope that they may care to reprint it in a pamphlet for general distribution. It tells more about my scheme and gives more of the atmosphere of it than any other thing of anything like the same length yet written. You did it not only with fine economy, but with a convincing combination of sympathy and restraint.
You made one slight error for which you are not to blame. I was not the clerk of the Indian Agent, but of an Indian trader whose business was to get the Indian's money in any possible way, including usury and poker. We were much closer to the Indian than those in the Indian Office were, however. If the article is reprinted, there'll be no difficulty in correcting so slight an error. As a matter of fact, no one but myself and my associates of that time would know the difference.
Mott, you ought to be in for criticism. Why don't you? God knows there's little enough of the same variety mow you'd be the sort of critic who honestly tries to find out what a thing is. You wouldn't be tearing your hair and shirt in a mad effort to impress the reader with your own surpassing brilliance - which is what most do. Objective criticism, in so far as that is possible, is the only thing; and that would be your kind. To be a great critic now would mean far greater service than to be a very great novelist; for great work is being done. What we need is the winnowing mind.
I heard that I'm to be with you in May, and I know to whom I owe the opportunity! I'm looking forward to the meeting with joy. A week from today I leave for a month's trip. Have eleven engagements during the first two weeks - pretty strenuous for even a little buffalo. My dynamo goes so fast when I'm talking and reading to people, and the loss of vitality is very great. I keep thinking I can be unconcerned, & so save my nerves; but that is impossible to me. Even when I talk to a friend - an intelligent one - in my own room, the wheels hum. It's unfortunate.
I've just completed The Beecher Island Fight; easily my best work to date. It's a battle, Mott. People will say that I got the fighting on paper, I'm sure; and it's simple, straightforward stuff - no heroics. When one says less, people guess more. Now I'm ready to swing into the last group of events, & they are the biggest events of the whole action.
Jno. Neihardt
